Only a handful of the many, many servants in Jane Austen’s novels
actually speak.Sometimes their words
are reported by someone else, but rarely do they say anything for themselves,
and certainly never anything about themselves.The intimate nature of servants’ duties meant that they witnessed
most of what went on: they saw their masters and mistresses in dress and
undress, in fair and foul temper; they watched, worried, rejoiced, criticized,
despised or admired along with them.Yet they never really participated.The servants hover and cluster in Jane’s plots like movie extras,
filling the background spaces, with hardly a recognizable face among them,
absolutely necessary, almost always dumb.

This is not unusual.The lack of presentation in literature of ordinary, working folk
has long been recognized.Servants,
indeed, are luckier than most others of their class in that, however
marginally, they are at least present.Servants occur in large numbers across a great range of literature,
their roles as low as their class origins – comic relief, extensions or
reflections of their masters and mistresses, useful cardboard figures to
further the plot.Jane’s servants
merely conform in this regard, although they are also peculiarly of their time
and place in being so silent.Fictional
servants are sometimes talkative and cheeky, but in Britain by the nineteenth
century servants have stopped answering back.Silence was the rule, in life as well as in literature.

In a popular book dealing with the servant problem, Domestic
Management, the author, Dr. Trusler, makes that quite clear.“No servant should either sing, whistle, or
talk loud, in the hearing of any of his master’s family, nor make any other
noise about the house ….A servant
should neither blow his nose or spit in his master’s presence; and, if
possible, neither sneeze nor cough.”I
became rather attached to the snappish Dr. Trusler, largely because he proceeds
by negatives.“Don’t do this,” he says,
“Don’t do that,” and thereby opens up undreamt-of possibilities: “men and maids
[should not] romp in the kitchen, unless they mean that the tables and chairs
should not have more than three legs each.”Boys should not write “their names on the ceiling of the hall of kitchen
with smoke of the candle.”

Thinking of the servants in Jane’s novels, endlessly
condemned to open doors and shutters, carry messages, light fires, mend slits
in dresses, look after rambunctious children, wait at table, drive carriages,
arrange hair, attend their masters and mistresses on every possible occasion, I
take a sly pleasure in imagining them whooping it up in the kitchen and
breaking the furniture.

That is partly because I am endowed with the usual
twentieth century democratic sensibilities, of course, including a belief in
minority rights and equal opportunity.I should probably have been out there encouraging Jane’s servants to go
on strike – not for pay, but for lines, for a decent role, for recognition.

Do you remember when, after an absence of seven
years, Fanny Price meets her beloved brother William at Mansfield Park?The “first minutes of exquisite feeling had
no interruption and no witnesses, unless the servants chiefly intent upon
opening the proper doors could be counted as such.”That’s what servants generally are: non-witnesses, non-people.

As another example, consider Anne Elliot – of all
Jane’s heroines surely the model of right-thinking – and Nurse Rooke.Mrs. Rooke attends on Anne’s friend Mrs.
Smith, who says of her that “besides nursing me most admirably, [she] has
really proved an invaluable acquaintance,” further, that she is “a shrewd,
intelligent, sensible woman.”On one occasion,
Mrs. Smith asks Anne:

“Did
you observe the woman who opened the door to you, when you called yesterday?”

“No.Was it not Mrs. Speed, as usual, or the
maid?I observed no-one in particular.”

“It was my friend, Mrs. Rooke – Nurse Rooke, who, by the
by, had a great curiosity to see you, and was delighted to be in the way to let
you in.”

Anne did not notice that someone she had never seen before was opening
the door, nor does she exhibit any curiosity about Nurse Rooke.Nurse Rooke is “no-one in particular”; just
a servant.Even the nicest people
looked right through you.

Introduce yourself, Nurse Rooke, I say, let Anne
know you are there, even if you must curtsey as you do it.Struggle against the passive or you’ll be
eliminated, I want to advise Emma’s maid, when I read, “The hair was curled and
the maid sent away.”In this spirit, I
shall be providing a life for Jane’s servants, crossing and re-crossing the
boundaries between fact and fiction, between real life and its representation
in literature.

In an age like ours, in which so much value is
placed upon independence and self-sufficiency, the idea of being a servant,
and, especially, being content to be a servant is unappealing,
distasteful even.Had they no
ambition?Were they quite spineless?Samuel and Sarah Adams, who, after a
combined total of fifty years in service, wrote The Complete Servant, “a
practical guide to the Peculiar Duties and Business of all descriptions of
servants, from the Housekeeper to the Servant of all-Work, and from the Land
Steward to the Foot-Boy,” explain it thus:

The
supreme Lord of the universe has, in his wisdom, rendered the various
conditions of mankind necessary to our individual happiness: – some are rich,
others poor – some are masters, and others servants.– Subordination, indeed, attaches to your rank in life, but not
disgrace.All men are servants in
different degrees.

Emphasizing that it is no disgrace to be a servant instantly suggests,
of course, that someone might have thought it was.Still, generally speaking, contentment in that station of life in
which God had seen fit to place you was a reality and not just a pious
platitude.The only suggestion we have
in Jane’s novels of discontent is the sentence in Mansfield Park which I
still find welcome (and which sparked my first novel) that the scene-painter
had “made five of the under-servants idle and dissatisfied.”

I’m not sure that I had ever particularly noticed
the servants till then.After that I
realized they were everywhere.Mrs.
Dashwood and her daughters, treated in such a niggardly way by the John
Dashwoods, can still afford two maids and a man; even the humble Bateses have
Patty.Anne Elliot’s Mrs. Smith is a
“poor, infirm, helpless widow” “living in a very humble way, unable to afford
herself the comfort of a servant,” and Mrs. Smith is an object of the utmost
pity.To be without a servant is to be
poor indeed.

Servants’ duties in large households were carefully
defined.At the top of the hierarchy
were butler and housekeeper, below them, in descending rank, on the female
side, cook, lady’s maid, head nurse, then nursery maids, housemaids upper and
under, kitchen maid, laundry maid, dairy maid, scullion.On the male side, valet, coachman, footmen,
grooms.Important outside staff included
steward, bailiff, gamekeeper and gardener, and withindoors there was also that
poor female of anomalous rank, the governess.I hardly need to add that this list only represents an average.The individual family employed whom it
needed, made the rules, created the atmosphere, made the servants’ lives more
or less bearable in hundreds of different ways.

General Tilney of Northanger Abbey, not the
most lovable of men, endears himself to me because he has renovated “the
ancient kitchen of the convent, rich in the massy walls and smoke of former
days, and in the stoves and hot closets of the present … every modern invention
to facilitate the labour of the cooks, had been adopted within this, their
spacious theatre.”Such careful
interest was uncommon. In 1819 Charles
Sylvester asserted: “Nothing can be more preposterous and inappropriate than
the prevailing construction and management of a gentleman’s kitchen.”The reason the kitchen was so far from the
dining-room was the smells.English
country-houses continued to spit-roast before open fires, and although the
Adamses say much (all sounding unappetizing) about boiling, the conditions in
the kitchen must have made great demands on the temper: heat, smoke (the
kitchen smoked at Barton Cottage), lack of ventilation.Records of temperamental cooks in memoirs
and reminiscences are legion.We don’t
hear of them in the novels, but in the Letters Jane does refer to Cook
being always “tried by a wet season” but not “lamenting much yet.”

The only cook favoured with a name in the novels is,
not surprisingly, Serle at Hartfield.Despite Mr. Woodhouse’s devotion to Serle –“I would not recommend an egg boiled by anyone else” – I am sure
it would have been preferable to work at Northanger.One might have had to keep out of General Tilney’s way, but Mr.
Woodhouse’s anxiety about under-cooked asparagus and over-salted pork suggest a
gastronomic taste fit to break the spirit of any self-respecting cook.

Serle was probably, like most cooks, female.Although a man cook, “generally a
foreigner,” is “now a requisite member in the establishment of a man of
fashion,” as the Adamses explain, men cooks are kept in only about 300-400
great and wealthy families and about 40-50 London hotels.This throws light upon Mrs. Bennet’s
elaborately sarcastic reference to Darcy: “even he acknowledged that the
partridges were remarkably well done; and I suppose he has two or three French
cooks at least.”If a French cook were
kept, he was well paid: the man cook is top of the Adamses’ wage scale at 80
guineas, followed by the Head Gamekeeper at 70.

Cook was second to housekeeper, except in her own
domain, the kitchen.Housekeeper and
butler were equal in status but not in pay.On the Adamses’ scale, 50 guineas is suggested for the butler, only 24
for the housekeeper.Many women were in
domestic service – indeed, later in the century, the overwhelming majority of
more than a million servants in England was female – but the number of male
servants in a household was still a mark of rank and wealth: a tax on male
servants of one guinea per head had been introduced in 1777, and by 1808, if
there were more than eleven male servants in the household, the tax on each was
£7 (by comparison, the annual wage of a dairy maid was 8 guineas).

In the novels housekeepers are the class of servant
most often given lines, names, sometimes even a hint of character: Mrs.
Whitaker at Sotherton, Mrs. Hill at Longbourn, Mrs. Hodges at Donwell Abbey,
Mrs. Reynolds at Pemberley.We
encounter Mrs. Nicholls of Netherfield hurrying to the butcher, and feeling
relieved that there are “three couple of ducks just fit to be killed” because
the Bingleys’ return is imminent.When
Mrs. Bennet is alarmed at the possibility of Mr. Bingley coming to dine – “good
Lord! how unlucky! there is not a bit of fish to be got today” – her first
instruction is “Lydia, my love, ring the bell.I must speak to Hill this moment.”Shopping was one of the housekeeper’s chief responsibilities.In addition, she oversaw the female servants,
kept an inventory of the furniture, linen and plate, and numbered and accounted
for items such as house-cloths and knife-cloths.The mark of her distinction as highest-ranking female servant was
that she had a room of her own.Next to
it, and in her charge, was the store-room, where dried fruits, spices,
condiments, soap, candles, starch, even supplies of writing-paper were
kept.And also of course, “arrowroot of
very superior quality” such as is despatched by Emma, after consultation with
her housekeeper, to Jane Fairfax when she is ill.

The recipes the Adamses provide for the housekeeper
include liquorice lozenges, whipped syllabub, muffins, gingerbread, sauerkraut,
piccalilli, gilliflower wine, turnip wine, tooth powder, a wash for sunburnt
faces, macouba snuff, spruce beer, liquid magnesia and portable lemonade.It was also often her task to make “the best
pastry.”Mrs. Hodges at Donwell Abbey
is “quite displeased” when Mr. Knightley gives away the last of his
apples.“She could not bear that her
master should not be able to have another apple-tart this spring.”Housekeepers do assert themselves mildly on
the odd occasion.“Mrs. Hodges would
be cross sometimes …, ” and Jane in the Letters shows herself wary of
offence.“It is rather impertinent to
suggest any household care to a housekeeper, but I just venture to say that the
coffee-mill will be wanted every day.”

The life of a housekeeper, as delineated in the
novels, is not without its pleasures.Mrs. Whitaker of Sotherton keeps pheasants (as Mrs. Norris discovers to
her advantage) and has time to talk to the visitors.The housekeeper was also in charge when the family was not in
residence.For although it was customary,
if the family owned more than one house, for the servants to travel with them,
the housekeeper was usually permanently resident in one place.At such times, she and the skeleton staff
were provided with “board wages,” and she was responsible for escorting
visitors on guided tours of the house.

When Mrs. Reynolds conducts Lizzy and the Gardiners
around Pemberley, she actually participates in the conversation for three pages
(a record).Lizzy discovers the
housekeeper to be “a respectable-looking, elderly woman, much less fine, and
more civil, than she had any notion of finding her.”At first taken aback by the praise Mrs. Reynolds lavishes on Mr.
Darcy, Lizzy later reflects that “it was of no trifling nature.What praise is more valuable than the praise
of an intelligent servant?” This is not taken for granted, notice, it is a
point of view Lizzy has to work out – and she probably wouldn’t have bothered
if what Mrs. Reynolds said didn’t coincide with her own inclinations.

Mrs. Gardiner, less in the know, is more dismissive:
“the good lady who showed us the house did give him a most flaming
character.I could hardly help laughing
aloud sometimes.But he is a liberal
master, I suppose, and that in the eye of a servant comprehends every
virtue.”A servant’s judgement, in
other words, is governed exclusively by self-interest. Later, as they all begin to like Darcy more,
“there was … an interest … in believing the housekeeper; and they soon became
sensible, that the authority of a servant who had known him since he was four
years old, and whose manners indicated respectability, was not to be hastily
rejected.”

Jane separates herself from Lizzy and Mrs. Gardiner
here, but the same cautious attitude is discernible towards Mrs. Hill of
Longbourn.The family knows that Mrs.
Bennet, distraught after Lydia’s elopement, has not “prudence enough to hold
her tongue before the servants, while they waited at table.”They therefore “judged it better that one
only of the household, and one whom they could most trust” – that is, Mrs. Hill
– look after her.Instead of
“completely trust,” or “upon whose discretion they could rely,” the phrase is
qualified: “whom they could most trust.”

Later, when Mrs. Bennet summons her instantly to
report, “My dear Hill, have you heard the good news?Miss Lydia is going to be married; and you shall all have a bowl
of punch, to make merry at her wedding,” Elizabeth only thinks to deplore her
mother’s lack of restraint.Yet Mrs.
Hill has borne nobly with Mrs. Bennet’s lamentations and has, at the family’s
request, been closest to her throughout this difficult time.Come Miss Lizzy, I say, never mind your
mother’s failings, think of what is due to the good Mrs. Hill.

An interesting assumption in Pride &
Prejudice is that it is possible to keep Lydia’s disgrace a secret from the
other servants.William Tayler, a real
footman who kept a diary (notable for its good sense if not its spelling) would
have shaken his head at that.

I
heared of a young Lady not long agoe in Devonshire that was courted by a
gentleman and was to of been married to him, but she, poor thing, proved in the
famly way and he was blackguard enough to leave her before the wedding took
place.This matter was kept a secret
and her father took her abroad but took no servants nor no one with them that
could bring back any news with them, but these things never escape the eys and
ears of servants.These matters are
shore to be known by them.

As Thackeray observed about the footman in Pendennis, “Nothing is
a secret.Take it as a rule that John
knows everything.”

Jane would probably allow that he might but
shouldn’t.Throughout the novels, she
is consistently of the opinion that too much intimacy with servants is a bad
thing.It is all right to show the baby
to the housekeeper, as Charlotte Palmer does when she returns to Cleveland, but
Lydia oversteps the mark – as Lydia always does –when she goes “after dinner to
shew her ring and boast of being married, to Mrs. Hill and the two
housemaids.”So does Mrs. Jennings, in Sense
& Sensibility, when, in order to satisfy her curiosity as to where
exactly Marianne and Willoughby have gone, she makes “her own woman enquire of
Mr. Willoughby’s groom.”

The novel in which servants have the highest
profile is Mansfield Park.For
that we have to thank Mrs. Norris.Dislike her as I may, I am grateful for that.Her prying, officious ways make us pay them attention.She reports how she has taken to task the
son of the estate carpenter, Christopher Jackson.

“I
hate such encroaching people (the Jacksons are very encroaching, I have always
said so, – just the sort of people to get all they can.)I said to the boy directly – (a great
lubberly boy of ten years old you know, who ought to be ashamed of himself,) I’ll
take the boards to your father, Dick; so get you home again as fast as you
can.– The boy looked very silly and
turned away without offering a word, for I believe I might speak pretty sharp;
and I dare say it will cure him of coming marauding about the house for one
while, – I hate such greediness – so good as your father is to the family,
employing the man all the year round!”

Suddenly our sympathy is aroused; we are aware of little Dick Jackson,
gangly, growing like a weed and no doubt very hungry, hanging around the
servants’ hall, only to have his hopes of a free lunch thwarted.

It is Baddeley, the butler in Mansfield Park,
to whom is allotted the singular pleasure of vanquishing Mrs. Norris, when she
insists that it cannot be Fanny whom Sir Thomas wishes to see:

But Baddeley was stout.“No, Ma’am, it is Miss Price, I am certain of its being Miss
Price.”And there was a half smile with
the words which meant, “I do not think YOU would answer the purpose at all.”

That half smile, as a friend of mine pointed out, is the single occasion
in the novels on which criticism is levelled by a servant at his betters.

As well as heading daily “the solemn procession … of
tea-board, urn and cake-bearers,” Baddeley would have looked after the cellar,
superintended the bottling of wine and the brewing of beer, kept the plate
under lock and key and supervised dinner from the sideboard, where he would
hand wine.The Adamses also say that a
butler ought to be able to write a fine hand and in the way of perquisites may
expect his master’s cast-off clothes, pieces of wax candle, the second-hand
cards, compliments on paying tradesman’s bills, and Christmas boxes and wine
for his own use.They include instructions
on such matters as how to put out a fire in the chimney.It is, you will remember, one of Baddeley’s
“noble fires” which Mrs. Norris “was entirely taken up ... in fresh arranging
and injuring.”

Several hints suggest that Sir Thomas is close to
Baddeley, and one reason may be that, as the Adamses explain, the first duty of
the butler “where no valet is kept is to manage and arrange his master’s
clothes, carry them to his dressing-room, boots and shoes being cleaned by
footman or under-butler.”Jane does not
use the term “valet” so far as I know, and distinguishes the function only by
the phrase “his own man.”The only
gentleman in Jane’s novels whom we know to have a valet is Sir Walter Elliot
and, since vanity was “the beginning and the end” of Sir Walter’s character,
one can reasonably infer that, as far as Jane was concerned, a gentleman’s
possessing a personal servant smacked of it too.

The importance of the coachman may be gauged by Mr.
Woodhouse’s frequent and solicitous references to James.Wilcox, the old coachman at Mansfield Park,
plagued with rheumatics, as were many who sat on the box, is equally “steady”
(a term of great approval).Maria
Bertram calls Wilcox “a stupid old fellow” who “does not know how to drive.”But Maria no doubt hankers after the fast
and stylish handling of a coach and four which young Regency bucks prided
themselves upon.Everyone else regards
Wilcox with great affection.Mrs.
Norris refers to his “great love and kindness,” and his anxiety lest the narrow
lanes on the way to Sotherton will scratch the varnish of the carriage.

It is interesting that, although there are many more
references to James at Hartfield, we know less about him than we do about
Wilcox.James exists only as an
expression of Mr. Woodhouse’s personality.But if you want to know what James, or Wilcox looked like, I offer the
Adamses’ affectionate description: “Every genuine coachman has his
characteristic costume.His flaxen
curls or wig, his low cocked hat, his plush breeches, and his benjamin surtout,
his clothes … well brushed, and the lace and buttons in a state of high
polish.”

The ultimate authority over the inside servants
belonged, naturally, to the lady of the house.Some took this duty more seriously than others: some had more
aptitude.One of the telltale signs of
poor management is too much talk about the servant problem.Poor Mrs. Price gets off on this subject as
soon as Fanny arrives in Portsmouth: “the shocking character of all the
Portsmouth servants, of whom she believed her own two were the very worst,
engrossed her completely.The Bertrams
were all forgotten in detailing the faults of Rebecca.”In Persuasion the mild animosity
between the elder Mrs. Musgrove and her daughter-in-law is expressed through
their bickering about servants, notably Jemima, Mary’s nursery-maid, conducted
– unfortunately for her – via Anne.Mary tells Anne that her mother-in-law’s upper house-maid and
laundry-maid “are gadding about the village all day long.I meet them wherever I go; and I declare, I
never go twice into my nursery without seeing something of them.If Jemima were not the trustiest, steadiest
creature in the world, it would be enough to spoil her, for she tells me, they
are always tempting her to take a walk with them.”The elder Mrs. Musgrove, for her part, confides: “I have no very
good opinion of Mrs. Charles’s nursery-maid: I hear strange stories of her; she
is always upon the gad: and from my own knowledge, I can declare, she is such a
fine-dressing lady, that she is enough to ruin any servants she comes near.”

Servants are here, as elsewhere, no more than
sounding boards for their employers’ characters.We never have an objective judgement of Jemima, for instance, any
more than we are ever given an idea of James the coachman’s personality.It is Mary Musgrove’s superficiality and
selfishness we deplore when she will go out, although her little son is
sick.“Jemima is so careful!” she says
(which we already have reason to doubt); “And she could send us word every hour
how he was.”

From the repeated insistence on the necessity for
masters and mistresses to take responsibility, one must infer its converse:
that servants as a class lack sufficient intelligence or devotion to do
so.Tom Bertram “left by himself … to
the comforts of sickness and solitude, and the attendance only of servants”
rapidly declined into a “dangerous illness.”It is a sadly limited assumption, and one which the actions of
individual servants, both real and fictional (think of the Musgroves’ old nursery
maid, Sarah, who is so delighted to “go and help nurse dear Miss Louisa”)
frequently belie.

The problems the lady of the house might encounter
with maids like Jemima are wonderfully suggested by the rules for the
management of the household compiled in her day-book in 1814 by Lady Hippisley,
wife of Sir John Cox Hippisley, of Ston Easton Park near Bath.

No
maidservant is to go out without applying to the Housekeeper.

No
strangers or other persons from the village to enter the kitchen, as they may
wait in the archway until they obtain the answer required.

A
small lanthorn to be given to each Maid, which she is to go about the house
with, and use going to bed, and on no account deviate from this safe rule.[The danger of fire, by the way, especially
from candles, is regularly warned against.The servant careless enough to set the house on fire was by law subject
to a penalty of £100.]

The Maids are to have their
allowance of Beer, a pint, served to them after Dinner, in the kitchen.

No
washing allowed to the Maids excepting a certain proportion of those articles
of cook’s dress supposed to be dirtied in her kitchen business.A proper proportion of Soap and Starch to be
allowed them by the Housekeeper to wash their clothes with themselves …

All
wages to be paid 1st May and November.No perquisites.

At
ten o’clock the Kitchen fire and all lights are to be extinguished and all the
Maids are to go to bed, except when one of the Housemaids is to set up to warm
the beds: in such case they are set up alternately ….The board wages at Ston Easton are … 6/- per week, with
vegetables from the garden, Small Beer, Coal and Candle.

No butter is ever allowed “in the Hall” and tea is mentioned only at
Christmas.We are reminded of Mrs.
Norris’s disapproval of the “quantity of butter and eggs that were regularly
consumed” by the new incumbents of Mansfield Parsonage, and her delight in the
discovery that the housekeeper at Sotherton does not allow wine at the second
table.

Lower-ranking men servants wore livery, women did
not.Maids in cap and apron are a Victorian
invention.Livery was associated with
wealth, rank and large numbers of servants.Catherine Morland admires General Tilney’s fashionable chaise-and-four
in which she travels to Northanger Abbey, and also the “postilions handsomely
liveried, rising so regularly in their stirrups, and numerous outriders
properly mounted.”The livery the real
John MacDonald, an eighteenth-century footman, wore when he was a boy postilion
consisted of a green jacket with red cape, red waistcoat and a leather cap with
the forepart lined with red morocco.Livery colours were bright, showy and a means of identification.Sir Walter Elliot, hearing of Admiral
Croft’s being stationed in the East Indies assumes that “his face is about as
orange as the cuffs and capes of my livery.”

Evidence suggests that in real life most male
servants did not enjoy wearing livery.Senior male servants did not have to, and John MacDonald records that on
one occasion, when he “gave warning” (handed in his notice) his master offers
the inducement “if you were to stay, I would soon put you out of livery.”One fifteen-year-old boy was made to wear
livery when he went into the service of a rector and his family.This was snobbery and he hated it.It “was a harlequin dress indeed,” he says;
“I can only liken it to the costume worn by some of the attendants at a
well-to-do circus.”He was also
mortified by the rector’s daughter’s uncomplimentary reference to the shape of
his calves.It was not uncommon to use
padding to improve them.No wonder
livery was disliked.In her Letters
Jane refers to a servant who was offered employment by her aunt Leigh Perrot:
“John Binns has been offered their place, but declines it – as she supposes,
because he will not wear a Livery.”

Women wore no uniform, but this did not simplify
matters.The admonitions on female
servants’ attire are numerous, Dr. Trusler’s remarks being typical: “being
gaily drest, in gauze and ribbands, is always a blemish on her character, she
will be thought to dress for the men more than for a place.”When Mrs. Musgrove refers to Jemima as
“fine-dressing” it is no term of approval.Mrs. Norris is delighted to find that the housekeeper at Sotherton had
“turned away two housemaids for wearing white gowns.”This again is a question of “fine dressing”; the accessibility of
washable cotton was still so recent that the white gowns it made possible were
reserved to the upper classes.Ladies’
maids were criticized most often.Traditionally, mistress handed down cast-offs to maid, but the practice
was deplored in all books of instruction, since it encouraged servants to ape
their betters.Jonas Hanway advised
selling the cast-offs rather than wearing them.

Ladies’ maids were certainly inclined to give
themselves airs.When Lady Bertram sends
her maid, Chapman, to help Fanny dress: “Fanny felt her aunt’s attention almost
as much as Lady Bertram or Mrs. Chapman could do themselves.”When Jane Bennet is ill at Netherfield,
Bingley’s sisters send enquiries via their maids: “the two elegant ladies who
waited on his sisters.”But these were
a superior kind of servant, after all.The author of Duties of a Lady’s Maid (1825) actually provides a
guide to correct pronunciation, and a vocabulary of vulgarisms with their
genteel equivalents.

The Adamses’ list of the duties of a servant or
maid-of-all-work (Mrs. Jennings’ term is girl of all works) covers eight pages;
since the position in effect combined the work which was done in a larger house
by four or five people, the list is daunting.“Slavey” first recorded in 1821, was the common and revealing slang term
for such servants.One real-life
servant, a licensed victualler’s daughter whose memoirs were published in 1844,
recalls that one of her mistresses, highly connected but penurious, did not feed
her properly, but seeing the maid’s interest in the spinet said “she would
teach me to play on it, if I would not eat so much as I could not learn with a
full stomach.”What a heart-rending
choice!Needless to say, the maid did
not learn to play the spinet, although she was plainly intelligent, sensitive
and longing to improve herself.

The maids-of-all-work we see in the novels suffer no
unkindness.Patty, who works for the
Bateses, washes the kitchen, reports that the chimney needs sweeping, and “makes
an excellent apple-dumpling.”She is
obviously the maid who, opening the door to Emma, “looked frightened and
awkward.”Clearly Patty isn’t a very
good door-opener.The problem with
servants of all work as Dr. Trusler pointed out, was that they were “hourly in
want of instruction.”Rebecca certainly
was, to judge from the inedible hashes and puddings she produced in Portsmouth,
the “half-cleaned plates, and not half-cleaned knives and forks” “the cups and
saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue”
and the greasy bread and butter.

But some mistresses did not care to give
instruction.In her first job, at age
thirteen, the licensed victualler’s daughter explains: “My mistress … made me
nurse the child and do everything that was laborious; but all that required any
art or knowledge, she not only would not let me do, but would send me out of
the way, with the little boy, while she did it herself.This was done that I should not leave her,
or think myself qualified for a better place.In the winter, water used to come into the cellars; and I have been
bolted in there for hours together, till I have been nearly exhausted with
pumping, and almost poisoned with the smell: however, I was well fed – living
just the same as they did, and partaking of whatever they had; and I gained
strength in proportion to my growth.”

There were generally two housemaids, upper and
under, whose main duties were cleaning.Catherine Morland hurries to her room to be alone after hearing news of
her brother’s broken engagement with Isabella Thorpe, “but the housemaids were
busy in it, and she was obliged to come down again.”It is to be hoped they were doing a better job than those Dr.
Trusler describes, who “in sweeping their mistress’s room, rather than stoop
half a dozen times, will sweep everything before them, foul linen,
handkerchiefs, pin-cushions, teaspoons, ribbons, slippers etc. into a corner,
and pick them up in a lump.”It sounds
as if the mistress needs castigating more than the maids. Trusler spends some time on the sensitive
issue of how best to get chamber pot and contents downstairs without anyone
seeing it, and reminds the maids that if they are “sweating in hot weather,
whilst shaking the bed,” they must not “wipe their faces on the sheets.”“This is as bad,” he continues, “as combing
their heads in the room, with their ladies’ combs, washing with their soap,
wiping with their towels, wearing their linen when thrown off, making free with
thread, pins etc.; or making use of their master’s razors, to cut their
corns.”Trusler might well have called
his book Domestic Mismanagement instead of Domestic Management.

More servants could read and write than one
might expect.In the Letters,
Jane Austen mentions James for whom she intends to provide reading matter.
“Unfortunately he has read the 1st Vol of Robinson Crusoe.We have the Pickards newspaper however which
I shall take care to lend him.”The
Adamses encouraged upper servants to teach lower ones their letters.“Read the Bible to those who cannot [read],
and, if you have time, teach them to read it for themselves.”They also suggest that the multiplication
and money tables should be “learnt by heart by all young servants in the
evenings or when they have leisure.”But schools expressly founded for servants did not always include
reading and writing in the curriculum.The object of writer and reformer Hannah More was “to train up the lower
classes in habits of industry and piety.”“I allow of no writing for the poor.”Like many she believed that education merely bred discontent.

There were masters who encouraged talent in
their servants.Elizabeth Ratclyffe, a
clockmaker’s daughter who was taken on by the Yorke family because her aunt was
personal maid to Mrs. Yorke, had considerable artistic ability.The Yorkes provided her with drawing
materials and showed the best of her work to their friends.That was in the mid-eighteenth century.But the Yorkes were remarkable for their
attitude towards servants for over two centuries.Squire after squire wrote verses about the servants, and their
house contains more portraits of servants than members of the family.Talented servants would have been difficult
to deal with under most circumstances; Jane very sensibly left them out of the
novels.The only hint of accomplishment
is in Mansfield Park, where Fanny’s first ball is “built upon the
acquisition of a violin player in the servants’ hall.”

The divide between master and servant, which
increased during Jane’s lifetime, was bridged from time to time by passionate
connexions between master – or even mistress – and servant.Servants were warned by every commentator
against the danger.“Rich men are apt
to presume on the humble condition of poor girls, to mark them as their prey”
says Jonas Hanway.“Unfortunately for
the character of our country, it is considered to be a matter of little moment
for a gentleman to ruin an unsuspecting and confiding girl,” comments the
author of Duties of a Lady’s Maid.Oddly enough from our point of view, both writers denounce marriage as
strongly as seduction, because it was an unacceptable crossing of class
lines.William Tayler, our real
servant, cuts through the hypocrisy:

Axidents
of this kind happen to young wimin in high life as well as those in lower life,
only the higher ones have a better chance of hiding these matters; I don’t
meant to say these things happen with all the gentry, not by a very great
deal.It mite not happen once in twenty
famleys, but it do happen and they are very fond of exposeing the lower classes
when it takes place amongst them, therefore I think it’s only fair to expose
the uppere classes in return.

How did servants themselves feel about their
lot?We have very little to go on, but
William Tayler’s diary, which he kept for one year, is helpful.On January 1, which was “ushered in with
very cold frost and snow,” he “got up at half-past seven, cleaned the boys’
clothes and knives and lamps, got the parlour breakfast, lit my pantry fire [he
says elsewhere that his pantry was a “very comfortable room”], cleared
breakfast and washed it away, dressed myself, went to church, came back, got
parlour lunch, had my own dinner, sit by the fire and read the Penny
Magazine and opened the door when any visitors came.At 4 o’clock had my tea, took the lamps and
candles up into the drawing-room, shut the shutters, took glass, knives plate
etc. into the dining-room, layed the cloth for dinner, took the dinner up at
six o’clock, waited at dinner, brought the things down again at seven, washed
them up, brought down the dessert, got ready the tea, took it up at eight
o’clock, brought it down at half-past, washed up had my supper at nine, took
down the lamps and candles at half past ten and went to bed at eleven.All these things I have to do every day,
therefore have I mentioned the whole that I might not have to mention them
every day.”Here and elsewhere it is
clear that not only is his work tedious and repetitive but that he finds it so.

William Tayler was in a small household, fond of
his mistress and well treated.The
family chooses not to go out because he has a bad cold, and he sits by the fire
reading the history of England, “which always is to me very interesting.”The next day, although he feels much better,
his mistress still refuses to let him go out with the carriage.This he finds irksome.“I don’t like this being kept from going out
on their account because I cannot have the face to go out in the evening on my
own account.”(Perhaps James was
similarly suffocated by Mr. Woodhouse’s kindness.)William lives in but he is married, although his wife lives
elsewhere.All through his brief
journal, on a Sunday he will write, with a curious coy humour: “Have been to
church or somewhere else” – meaning, to see his wife, about whom he is
otherwise completely silent.

William regularly gets tips – at this time 5 p
seems to be the norm; on his days off, he goes to the theatre to see Cinderella,
hears a lecture on astronomy and visits the National Gallery and British
Museum.In Brighton he tries a little
comparative religion by attending the Roman Catholic church and then the
dissenting chapel.He reads
widely.Although he is clearly fit for
better things, William is a cheerful fellow and reasonably content, enjoying
the annual muffin feast and other parties given by and for servants.But the simile he rises to at the end of his
year’s journal is revealing: “The life of a gentleman’s servant is something
like that of a bird shut up in a cage.The bird is well housed and well fed but is deprived of liberty.”

That is why, on the “uncommonly lovely” March day
when the Prices take their airing on the ramparts in Portsmouth, unlike Mrs.
Price, I rejoice at seeing Rebecca in the distance with a flower in her
hat.It’s a sign of freedom,
independence, self-assertion.I vote we
present a flower to every one of the servants in Jane Austen’s novels.